Five books to take you on a journey.

The best nature writing is as much about creating a new mental landscape as it is about describing an external one. Whether the author is adventuring in the Amazon or wandering in the local woods, the way they conjure up nature does something to our internal topography, too. It raises our mood and extracts us from quotidian cares. Here are five fiction and non-fiction titles in which the wild is powerfully wedded to the written word. These are books so vivid they’ll give you blisters.

Wild: An Elemental Journey by Ms Jay Griffiths

How many books about nature have been read aloud by The Strokes and recommended by Radiohead? Just the one. Ms Jay Griffiths spent seven years exploring the Amazon, the Arctic, the Australian desert and the Indonesian sea in the company of indigenous people. A wildness addict, she beds down with polar bears and writes about the great outdoors as if it’s anything but wholesome. “I was tipsy with it before I began,” she says, “and roaring drunk by the end.”

A Walk In The Woods by Mr Bill Bryson

It’s hard to hike when you’re doubled up laughing, so one of the funniest travel books ever written (good call, CNN) is probably best enjoyed by the armchair traveller. Mr Bill Bryson attempts to tackle 2,200 miles of brutal mountain tracks on the Appalachian Trail with no previous hiking experience and in the company of a recovering alchoholic. Missing the joke somewhat, Mr Robert Redford was cast in the 2015 movie. Mr Bryson and his dishevelled buddy end up skipping large chunks of the trail, but you’ll relish every sentence.

In Patagonia by Mr Bruce Chatwin

“Man’s real home is not a house, but the road,” wrote Mr Bruce Chatwin. “Life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.” Possessed of a custom-made calf-skin haversack and a singular talent for storytelling, the English writer set out for South America in the 1970s on the trail of a family heirloom: a piece of giant sloth skin. In Patagonia remains a revolutionary piece of travel writing, a series of Cubist vignettes with a restless heart.

Wuthering Heights by Ms Emily Brontë

As genteel as a gale, Ms Emily Brontë’s portrayal of the wildness of human nature still has the power to shock. The Yorkshire moors are the backdrop for one of the most passionate and unsettling love stories ever told – domestic violence, incest and heavily implied necrophilia included. Ms Kate Bush may have whisked Heathcliff and Cathy to the pop peak with her number-one single, but this 19th-century novel remains as strange and untameable as the landscape that inspired it.

The Wild Places by Mr Robert MacFarlane

Next year, Mr Robert MacFarlane is set to publish Underland, a book about the lost worlds beneath our feet. For now, you’ll have to content yourself to his wanderings above the earth’s surface. In The Wild Places, he roams from ancient meadows to sea caves, leaps woodland streams and sleeps on cliff tops in search of the last remaining wildernesses of Britain and Ireland. Part of a bestselling trilogy about landscape and the human heart, it’s a bewitching book with a decidedly dashing guide.